During one of the 2012 presidential debates, incumbent president Barak Obama shanked his opponent Mitt Romney with a well-prepared and well-deployed line:

“Gov. Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaida. You said Russia … the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Ziiiing! What a dope, that Romney; still stuck in the Cold War.

As well-crafted, pre-loaded debate zingers often do, President Obama’s distorted his opponents’ actual position and statements. Romney’s comments on Russia responded to a hot-mic conversation between Obama and Russia’s presidential chairwarmer Dmitry Medvedev, letting Vladimir Putin’s bitch successor/predecessor know that after his re-election Obama would have “more flexibility” regarding missile sites in Eastern Europe.

Romney said:

“This is without question our No. 1 geopolitical foe. They fight for every cause for the world’s worst actors. The idea that he has more flexibility in mind for Russia is very, very troubling indeed… I’m saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, (Russia is) the nation that lines up with the world’s worst actors. Of course the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran, and a nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough. But when these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them … who is it that always stands up with the world’s worst actors? It’s always Russia, typically with China alongside. And so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council that has the heft of the Security Council, and is of course is a massive nuclear power, Russia is the geopolitical foe.”

Turns out that Romney was far more accurate in his assessment than Obama’s sly dismissal would have us believe. (President Obama had a penchant for dismissing threats that were actually quite significant. Remember, he once referred to ISIS as “the JV team.” Oops).

With a successful takeover in Crimea, an ongoing (and brutal) campaign to hold the Eastern Ukraine in its sphere of influence, a major role in the conflict and an outlandishly successful disruption campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia is a player.

And being a player may be what matters most to Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin wants to be a global player — but he’s not as strong as he tries to appear. Art by Rinat Shingareev.

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We’re paying close attention to Russia here at RIR, for several reasons. The first being that Russia is simply fascinating. “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” said Winston Churchill, with his customary flare for nailing it with a perfect rhetorical flourish. So it is, today as much as ever.

A study of Russia is a case study in the unraveling of Empire, and — while Russia is VERY different from the U.S. — there may be some relevant experience to be gleaned from the way the Russian case has played out.

The most pressing reason for plumbing the Russian Mysteries is that Russia is and will likely continue to be a significant disruptive force in an unraveling world order. But partisan furor and media hyperventilation over investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government tend to distort our understanding of Russia’s motives and actions.

Experienced Kremlin-watchers believe that Putin wasn’t so much focused on a certain outcome in the presidential election as he was on sowing chaos, undermining Americans’ confidence in our institutions, and bloodying the nose of Hillary Clinton.

The operation succeeded beyond all possible expectations — and the ongoing fallout is a gift to the Russians that will keep on giving, way past the holiday season. Which makes Vladimir Putin the sole winner of the 2016 election.

The response to the op-ed was… interesting… reflecting a strong desire among people who want a certain outcome from the “Russia investigation” to have their desires validated. That reaction in itself is revealing of the deep fissures and profound anger that dominate the American political landscape.

The Russian interference in Campaign 2016 did not create those divisions in American politics and society; it exploited those that already exist and are getting deeper, wider and more fundamental. Our own unraveling makes us vulnerable to hostile influence operations, which in turn accelerates the unraveling.

Over the past year, Russian hackers have become the stuff of legend in the United States. According to U.S. intelligence assessments and media investigations, they were responsible for breaching the servers of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They spread the information they filched through friendly outlets such as WikiLeaks, to devastating effect. With President Vladimir Putin’s blessing, they probed the voting infrastructure of various U.S. states. They quietly bought divisive ads and organized political events on Facebook, acting as the bellows in America’s raging culture wars.

We’ve taken to thinking of Putin as a strong leader and a kind of manipulative genius, playing chess while feckless, naïve or flat stupid American presidents are playing checkers.

Asymmetric warfare is by a definition a means for the weak to attack the strong. And Russia is weak. Its economy is stagnant; it’s a demographic basket case, with a life-expectancy for men at 64 and going down, mostly due to wretched alcohol abuse; and though it has upgraded its weapons systems and retains a nuclear arsenal, its military capabilities remain a shadow of the days of the Soviet Union, and cannot approach those of the U.S.

Ioffe again:

But most Russians don’t recognize the Russia portrayed in this story: powerful, organized, and led by an omniscient, omnipotent leader who is able to both formulate and execute a complex and highly detailed plot.

Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who helped Putin win his first presidential campaign, in 2000, and served as a Kremlin adviser until 2011, simply laughed when I asked him about Putin’s role in Donald Trump’s election. “We did an amazing job in the first decade of Putin’s rule of creating the illusion that Putin controls everything in Russia,” he said. “Now it’s just funny” how much Americans attribute to him.

A businessman who is high up in Putin’s United Russia party said over an espresso at a Moscow café: “You’re telling me that everything in Russia works as poorly as it does, except our hackers? Rosneft”—the state-owned oil giant—“doesn’t work well. Our health-care system doesn’t work well. Our education system doesn’t work well. And here, all of a sudden, are our hackers, and they’re amazing?”

The best analysis I’ve seen leads to the assessment that Russian hackers and social media bots were probing and pressing with fairly common types of attacks and trolling with “fake news” and inflammatory rhetoric that Americans are all too susceptible to. The campaign was not especially strategic — Putin was lashing out — and the operation was something on the order of “let’s throw bucketfuls of shit at the wall and see what sticks.”

None of that is to blow off the seriousness of the interference or to say that Russia isn’t dangerous; a weak, unstable country hyperconscious of its diminished stature in the world might well be far more dangerous than a powerful and self-secure nation. And what is truly remarkable — appalling, really — is that the U.S. body politic is so vulnerable to what was really not all that sophisticated an op.

A Dangerous Man. Art by Rohelion.

Ioffe:

Both Putin and his country are aging, declining—but the insecurities of decline present their own risks to America. The United States intelligence community is unanimous in its assessment not only that Russians interfered in the U.S. election but that, in the words of former FBI Director James Comey, “they will be back.” It is a stunning escalation of hostilities for a troubled country whose elites still have only a tenuous grasp of American politics. And it is classically Putin, and classically Russian: using daring aggression to mask weakness, to avenge deep resentments, and, at all costs, to survive.

If you’ve got some workout or drive time and want to take a deep dive into the psychology of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s influence operations in the 2016, PBS’s Frontline has provided a remarkable resource — raw interviews collected for the excellent 2017 documentary Putin’s Revenge.

The Putin Files is comprised of hours and hours of in-depth interviews with journalists (Ioffe is featured and her interview runs nearly 2 hours); Russian opposition figures; a former Putin advisor; U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials. There is, necessarily, some redundancy, as they are covering a lot of the same ground, but each interview is well worth the time. Here are links to just a few of two-dozen interviews.

The Putin Files: Julia Ioffe

The Putin Files: Gleb Pavlovsky

The Putin Files: James Clapper

The Putin Files: John Brennan

The Putin Files: Vladimir Kara-Murza — This twice-poisoned opposition figure offers particular insight into what Putin wants (or hopes for) from a Trump Presidency — overturning or at least non-implementation of the Magnitsky Act, which allows for specifically sanctioning individuals and threatens Putin’s inner circle and thus his power base. If a quid-pro-quo was on offer between the Trump campaign and Russia (which has not been established), it would certainly revive around the Magnitsky Act.

Born in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Jim Cornelius grew up dreaming of distant frontiers, of mountain men, long hunters, African explorers. His older brother gave him a tattered copy of Allan W. Eckert’s The Frontiersmen, a biography of Simon Kenton, and the twig was bent. Graduated from...

Russia is sort of the Anti America in a weird Star Trek sort of sense.

Granted, that is a really odd and strained analogy but our history in our respective geographic spaces is similar, but opposed. This probably stems from Russia having a strong internal crown where as we had a weak external parliamentary crown. So everything that went right here, from expansion into a vast wilderness to overthrowing a government, went right here, and wrong there. And so it continues.

Jim, thanks for the Russian info..now finally I for most part understand all the horseshit. Ive yet to read the PBS docs but will, although I don’t trust their super far left(my opinion) information..T

Well-said, Jim. I once got into a long, tiresome debate online with a Russian nationalist troll, who took exception to my comment that apart from super-duper fighter jets, heavy-lift rockets and world-class hackers and chess masters, Russia produced nothing of interest to the rest of the world. He launched into an endless summary of raw material production milestones: Flourspar up 72%!! Molybdenum up 14%! Potash up 127% under Putin’s regime, sounding just like the propagandists of the dark days of the USSR. Ah, the USSR, those were the days, when the rest of the world feared and respected Russia!! I “trumped” him when I wrote that I strolled through WalMart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy etc. and could not find a single thing made in Russia. Of course, gadgets and gewgaws do not a great country make, and Russia will always have Pushkin, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Shostakovich, the Bolshoi, etc. So much incredible intellectual talent, all unrealized in a regime of kleptocrats.

All very very interesting and journalistically well written and presented. Jim, expect nothing less from you. I hope Sisters appreciates the quality of their resident. Truly this is an economy of it’s own making. We endlessly [U.S.] need and want to make more and more weaponry. It’s a very dangerous world no doubt and it is at least profitable it has a silver lining [for some]. Certain things are expendable no doubt. However, do we really want a serious confrontation with any of the truly reliable threats? Since the end of the “old” Cold War we have let them run, both China and Russia. Right or wrong? You can trim the mustache but don’t cut the lip. They never do. We had created a high priced hegemony and now the price of maintenance is breaking both our will and our pocketbook. Absolute control is impossible. David slew Goliath with a sling. Was it his good heart or his good aim that did it. Maybe both. Maybe only metaphorical. We appear to be our own greatest enemy. We built up a monstrosity so to speak trying to hold ground as the morally superior. Another whole adventure in itself. You can never be strong enough or prepared enough so you better choose well on what you can live with. I won’t go into the deep background of all of that. These are just continuing machinations as Mathew so well alluded to ( hereditary enemies) to keep us up at night, spend treasure on and have brave soldiers geopolitically expended in the leveraging of never ending brinkmanship. Jim, with your recent FP post on Narcos and the like, I feel it is all related. You would think with what [may] appear to be Mexico becoming a failed state (and the State Of The Union) stating they are an existential threat to the U.S. we would be gearing up the Marines for an invasion or at least a shared effort with Mexico (like Iraq & Afghanistan) to obliterate the Cartels in short order. No, it’s better to build a billion dollar wall telling Mexico to go to hell. Better to make friends in Iraq and have Putin and Russia as endless excuses for our failures. Much like Sisyphus endlessly pushing a boulder uphill (getting nowhere) this never ends unless God forbid the unthinkable happens. Trust me, they want you to think it can. I remember asking my now deceased father-in-law about an article I read in the Kansas City Star and being curious about it mentioning there being escape tunnels from the Minute Man Missle silos that at the time surrounded Knob Noster Air Force Base. The article said they were full of sand and a release hatch allowed the sand to flow out allowing the crews to escape to the surface. His reply. “In a direct hit it would all be turned to glass.” You would be cooked!
Be careful what you read. My conclusion to this whole political posturing as well as military expenditure and deployment is to involve yourself to the level of your liking and belief. If you want to be a warrior be one. Keep in mind though that worthy causes other than saving your own skin and that of family, friends and the innocent are all highly suspect. I want to be loyal, I really do. They have to show me a lot more first until I give it…

At this stage of the Empire, I would say that being very chary of offering your loyalty to any institution is not only wise, but morally and ethically sound. We have to be wary of becoming merely cynical, but in a situation where we are not represented, we own no automatic loyalty.

P.S.
I do know why we have not invaded Mexico (yet) and Russia too for that matter. I was hopefully obviously being facetious. Great optics on this Jim and well Warren Zevon goes without saying. I am merely wading in the shallow end while you are diving into the deep end. Great stuff. A mind like a steel trap!!

When the Ukraine erupted in riots in 2014, there was a very good article about the drive for Putin to have central Europe “turn to Mother Russia” rather than the West. Be it Peter the Great, or Soviets, or Putin, Russian leaders want their country as a player on the world stage. I cannot find that article now.

However, I did find this. And it’s from 2014 — long before the noise of the 2016 US election.

At the NATO summit in Wales last week, General Philip Breedlove, the military alliance’s top commander, made a bold declaration. Russia, he said, is waging “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”

It was something of an underestimation. The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action.

A basically empty Siberia belonging to a failing Russia has to have mouths watering in Beijing.

Thinking of Lane, in many ways we can be thankful that Russia pushed East, before China was capable of pushing North. If China controlled the Russian Far East the Amur (Siberian) Tiger would be gone. Sadly, it still may go, but at least a little time has been bought.

From John Vallant’s “Tiger”- a book on the Amur Tiger discussing the Chinese side of the border.

»>With the exception of a swathe of forest along the Chinese-Russian border, what used to be the shuhai—Manchuria’s ocean of trees—has been largely stripped away. Every square yard of arable land appears to have been made useful with a vengeance—scraped off, plowed up, altered in one way or another. There is virtually nothing left in the way of animal or bird life. A magpie is an event. Every wild thing larger than a rat appears to have been eaten or poisoned. Stunted scrub oak still grows in russet waves on crags above the scoured plain, but down below, as far as the eye can see, spread the works of man.

.……

It is safe to say that had Czar Alexander II not annexed Outer Manchuria a century and a half ago, no wild tigers would remain there today and Primorye would be as unrecognizable as the neighboring provinces in China.”

Not really. Unless you buy into that distinct subspecies stuff. This was an official declaration to help pave the way for the cougars expanding from the West(and also up from Florida), to get official acceptance. QUITE A FEW documented cases, including BODIES(alas) to verify this–just check out the “Cougar Network” website for specifics. Only a matter of time(yee-haw!)–and you can bet, for every puma seen or shot or hit by a car, there are several others of these incredibly elusive cats that are NOT seen or documented. I sure hope I live long enough to see one(or evidence thereof) here in the Southeast.I f nothing else, the Appalachian chain will be EXCELLENT panther habitat again! Cougars(mountain lions, pumas, panthers, painters, catamounts, etc., etc., etc.) are perhaps the only large cat species doing fairly well, and expanding their range back into former areas in any numbers.….

I was just checking out another book: The Secret Twenties by Timothy Phillips.
I then remembered a story out of the early days of WW2: a Russian code book
was recovered and presented to FDR. He wanted it returned, gentlemen didn’t
do such things he said.
Another thorough job on a vexed subject Jim and commentators, thank you!

Damn — another fascinating book!
It’s pretty clear that FDR was naive about the Soviets in general and Stalin in particular. He certainly did not understand the depths of Stalin’s suspicions of the West, and we might attribute at least some of the penetration of America’s nuke program early on to an unduly “gentlemanly” sense of how allies should behave toward one another.

Thanks for the kind word, and I second you on the commentators. love to see this level of conversation betwixt and among. More vexed subjects to come. Maybe we should have that printed on business cards: Vexed Subject Specialists.

I love the novels of Alan Furst, one of his early ones deals with Beria, a secret diary
etc. Great insight into the workings of the NKVD.
The Phillips book looks like a doozie, podcast with the author on: Late Night Live,
Radio National, ABC Australia.
Business card ? I am thinking Convention !
Might start with a dropbox.….….……

Vexed is an apt description of what we are wading into for sure. It might get deep.
Bill V. don’t forget Turgenev. One of my favorites and Hemingway’s too.
Encouraging words from a just now conversation with my Dad who turns 89 this month. I brought up some of the vexing issues of today. His reply and I quote:

“For everything bad in the world something good is happening too.”

My Dad is a extremely positive person in spite of being to hell and back.
He does not suffer what he would call “weak sisters” either. Perhaps politically incorrect today, but I assure you he has the highest respect for women and they for him. I could never compete.
Some play the game dirty as with the scoundrels above. The world is full of it as so ably described by all here. I am not cynical. Far from it, but there is a line not to cross. Everyone has their own. Put a man (or woman) in a tight corner and you find out quick. The Russians did it with sheer man power against the Germans and their superior technology and probably deserve more credit with ending WW II than they got. Could Patton have taken them on and won? We will never know. Like a rock dropped in a lake one thing moves another. Play with fate and you are rolling dice on fire. The wind moves it’s own directions. Yeah, that’s the beauty of it all…

No doubt Jim!!
90 is a most impressive number!
I am certain outlook has everything to do with it.

As if more is needed I am watching NAZI MEGA WEAPONS: HITLERS KILLER SUBS…
A well done documentary. Considering it being not really that much less than our Dad’s ages when all of this took place it is pretty mind boggling.

My dad was liberated by the dads of your dads, citizen soldiers of the US.
He doesn’t like Putin much, probably feels he is much like those that occupied
his land. Patton was held back and we don’t know what outcome we would have
had, had things gone his way. One thing is for certain, he didn’t have soldiers in the
rear shooting anyone who retreated. If you want to win you have to be prepared to do
what your enemy doesn’t. Are we really opposing the Russians ? We failed to anticipate
the end of the cold war and we didn’t step in to help build a new Russia.
Now we are eating ourselves and letting a bunch criminals run things.
I can’t get all mystic about that despite the fact I take great hope from
army veterans joining native Americans, and making a stand, for example.
To loose hope is to die.
(p.s. sorry ’bout the “stereo” transmission, can you loose one?)

All this reminds me(again) of a great quote from a Russian cab driver, when the Canadian writer Farley Mowat was invited to tour Russia back in the day. Mowat asked the Russian fellow what he thought of all the blatant Russian propaganda everywhere, and he bluntly and succintly summed it up PERFECTLY–(paraphrased), “The difference between propaganda in Russia, and propaganda in the West, is ‚YOU BELIEVE YOURS!”

There’s quite a bit of truth in that. Read a very interesting book last year titled “Black Wind, White Snow” about Putin and Eurasianism, and the author noted that many Russians recognize the Big Lie — and often get kind of a kick out of the audacity of the Big Lie and admire someone with the balls to propagate it. Which is fucked up on many levels, of course. It may be, however, more “honest” than Americans’ insistence on actually believing our own bullshit.

During the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, in early 2003, I did a prodigious amount of reading and research on the WMD rationale and knew with almost complete certainty that it was bogus. That was wrenching for me. When I editorialized on the subject, an Angry Reader (REALLY angry) wanted to know who the hell I thought I was and what special knowledge I was claiming to assert that the WMD claim was bullshit. I told him I had no special knowledge at all, that I was just a guy in the middle of Oregon reading 100-percent open-source material and that he could do the same damn thing.
In a way, you could say that was the genesis of RIR. I was forced to recognize that we were no longer a Republic (probably hadn’t really been for a couple of generations) and that we were on an Imperial course that fundamentally shifts the citizens’ relationship with the state. I’m still working through the implications of that, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, pragmatically…
It also led to a near-compulsion to look deeper, even (or especially) when I didn’t like what I found.
I do not assert a moral equivalence between Russia and the U.S. I DO, however, think that we need to pay attention to Russia and recognize that we can easily slide into similar behaviors — especially under the pressure of crisis. And I also assert that it is naive to think that the danger only comes from the Right. The Left also has authoritarian tendencies, and the national security state — the “deep state” if you prefer — has its own imperatives.

Back before and during our recent presidential election, I was making facetious cracks about why we should all just go ahead and vote PUTIN in as president, and git it over with! Little did I realize at the time how kinda prophetic that would turn out! I DO get irritated at all this anti-Russian propaganda–not that we as Americans(Northern) should not be wary and aware, but doesn’t the U. S. A. have their fingers in just about every country’s political cookie jar throughout the world, yet we decrie Russia’s “interference” all the time? And how NAIVE to think the “cold war” ever truly ended! A REALLY FUN movie on that is the recent remake of “The Man From Uncle”–which I got outta the super-cheapo Wal-Mart movie bin awhile back. It is a HOOT! More of a comedy, I’d say, than a serious spy thriller, but I really had fun watching it! A good satire on our present situation, for sure. I especially like the sandwich-in-the-truck scene–as that would certainly have been MY priority!

Absolutely spot on amigos. I’ve been tempted to quote Jim Thompson before
you know the one about the 44 different ways to write a book but there only being
one plot: things are not always what they seem.
This is such a huge subject, the very notion of the cold war itself, as a concept, for
instance, has been brilliantly debunked by David Talbot and others before him.
Yes we are talking the brothers Dulles, now there’s a can of worms.….…anyone?

Putin (no doubt guilty of something and a lot of things). After all that’s his stock and trade. I would be so disappointed if he was not found to be proficient in his game. My greater fear however is our own native born problem. We will just have to see how it wends itself out. Second guessing does not feed the Bull Dog. Whether or not Putin (or Trump) has read Niccolò Machiavelli they definitely and instinctively know
the old and venerable tried and true DIVIDE AND CONQUER. Nothing new under the sun. You do not have to be a reader to know this. The difference today is the magnitude of those hurling suns…

Patton if anything was a colorful character.
I have been by the San Marino home and in the church with the stain glass window made for him. St. George slaying the dragon. Pancho Barnes was in the neighborhood and George and her rode horses together. Now there’s a pair to draw to…

“I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them… …the Russian has no regard for human life and they are all out sons-of-bitches, barbarians, and chronic drunks.”

Great!! I am impressed!!!
Some day privately I will tell you about an occurrence that happened out at the obscure plaque near Chiriaco Summit off the exit to Mecca and Joshua Tree. It was after a hiking trip to JTree. I don’t know what George would think. He might turn over in his grave (laughing I hope)…